100s of xorg ports, will there be an xorg-base port?

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2007-Jul-06 23:37:32 +0300, Evren Yurtesen <yurtesen at ispro.net> wrote:
> I think it would be nice if you could make an xorg-base port which will have 
> the minimal ports installed.

Please define "minimal ports installed".  Does you want an X server?  If
so, which of the 25 input and 35 video drivers should be included?  Maybe
it's reasonable to just include keyboard and mouse input drivers but the
video driver you need depends on your hardware.

How about fonts?  You have a choice of >100 packages, how do you select
which ones should be included.

Do you want X clients?  Which ones?

What X extensions are you going to need?

If you believe that an xorg-base port with some arbitrary set of ports
is worthwhile, you are welcome to create and submit it.

> Most of the programs like xeyes etc. are not needed,

How do you define "not needed"?  Just because you don't use xeyes
doesn't mean someone else doesn't.

> it is ridiculous to install a port for each!

The X.org project decided to modularize xorg.  Obviously, this means that
there will be lots of small ports instead of a few very large ports.  A
fairly obvious side-effect is that people will need to install more ports
than they used to.

> Plus, most people are not happy to add ~400 more ports to their FreeBSD 
> boxes.

Please explain what the problem is.  If you choose to install the xorg
metaport then the ports system will automatically fetch and install the
dependencies.  Exactly what aren't "most people" happy about?

> I even read that somebody is planning to change to Linux because of 
> this mess.

Where they will wind up with exactly the same problem because Linux
uses the same X server.  And, unless their distro includes the
equivalent to the FreeBSD meta-ports, they will actually had a much
harder time as they try to work out which of the >1000 X-related
packages they need to install to wind up with a working X system.

> Is this a planned change?

Well, presumably the X.org Project planned it.  The FreeBSD project just
adapted the X.org 7.2 release to the FreeBSD ports system and created a
number of meta-ports so that people didn't need to work out exactly which
of the hundreds of individual packages they needed to install.

> I think the whole idea of xorg going to seperate 
> packages was reducing the size and modularize xorg.

I don't know about reducing the size but the X.org Project did decide
to modularize X.org - and as far as I can see, this has been
successfully accomplished.

> When we install all anyhow, makes no sense at all.

No-one is forcing you to install it all.  If you choose to install the
xorg metaport then you wind up with all of X.org - as in the past.
The difference is that you now have the choice of only installing just
the bits you want - which can significantly reduce the size of your
X installation.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
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